I can’t give you an in-depth comparison, but I have used both Mobian and postmarketOS on the PinePhone. In fact, I have pmOS as my primary OS and Mobian installed as back up right now. When I first got the PinePhone, I ran Mobian testing for a few years. It was a roller coaster, but that was to be expected. Eventually some issue or another drove me to try pmOS and I immediately found it more performant and stable. The difference isn’t anything massive, though, as they run the same software, more or less. One odd thing I found was that with Mobian, my phone would noticeably heat up during calls, but not with pmOS. I don’t know why. I’ve mostly stuck with pmOS since.

So, overall, I found pmOS to be the better experience. I’m not sure if their decision to add systemd to their OS will be a good one, but we’ll see. Linux on phones is still in a flux. I had to give up using the PinePhone though, since the modem would mysteriously just vanish and a lot of smaller issues started adding up. Finally, MMS not supporting my carrier’s APN settings was what forced me to look at other options.

Hope this helps.

I can second Posteo. Functional, affordable, FOSS, ecological and private enough for my needs.

Distros packaging software means that it is available to install with the package manager from their repositories. No distro provides every piece of software out there. This can be mitigated with Flatpak, Snap, GUIX, AppImage or, in a pinch, by compiling the required program yourself.

Sounds like you’ve already done most of the work. From what you’ve said, Fedora with Plasma sounds great for your use case. Good luck on your journey and glad to have you aboard!

I honestly liked 8.1 quite a bit - once I installed Classic Shell to not have to deal with the new UI. A first year usability student could have foreseen the massive issues trying to weld a touch screen UI and a traditional desktop metaphor would raise, but Microsoft for some reason were completely pig headed about making it work. It didn’t. It can’t. You can not staple two completely different UI paradigms together and have it work smoothly. Other than that, 8.1 was remarkably good experience for me. It felt really snappy under the hood. Good OS brought down by hubris. Well, good for a Windows release, at least. Use Linux.

3.11 was pretty good. After that it’s been a mixed bag. A bag of shit, but mixed.

Yes and no.

I have also been very content with Posteo.

With low specs like that, the experience will never be great, but with a very light desktop you can make it work. Debian is fine, but with some set up, Alpine could be one option. It’s a really light distro.

Turns out this is also available in Alpine repositories, so I went ahead and installed it on my phone. Could come in handy when browsing from public Wi-Fi or such. Thanks for the tip.

I turn it off every night or if I’m away for many hours, so about 10 minutes right now.

I do have a Raspberry Pi that’s been up 12 weeks, 5 days, 19 hours, 59 minutes. I believe there was a planned power outage when it was lasted turned off.

Is it though? Is it? Though?

Yup, Konsole is good enough.

Now does flatpak get it’s programs from the same place that terminal would?

I usually install Flatpaks from the terminal, but as to your question: no, the distro’s package manager and Flatpak have different repositories (servers with software packages) and formats. While distros like Fedora have their own Flatpak repositories, most people use Flathub. You can install apps as Flatpak on any distro that supports them, but native package managers generally don’t support other distros’ repositories.

for some reason everybody hates snaps because canonical owns it.

As I understand it, Snap server software is proprietary and doesn’t support independent repositories, so you have to install Snaps from Canonical. This is not exactly in line with Free (as in Freedom) Software principles. Canonical has done many questionable decisions in the past.

Edit: Never mind, I misunderstood something. From what I remember, this post is more or less an accurate description of what to expect.

It’s a really good game. Check it out!

KDE Plasma. It makes sense to me and everything functions more or less how I prefer it to. If I need something, it’s usually easy enough to find. Plasma being flexible is a plus, but I rarely need to do any modifications.

I loathe GNOME. Any time I use it it’s like pulling teeth. On a touch surface I can maybe get it, but on desktop I honestly think it has some serious usability problems cooked in. And since GNOME extensions can break at any time, trying to “fix” GNOME is a losing battle. If I had to use GNOME, I’d install GNOME Classic which is ok. Or better yet, use XFCE or MATE. GNOME is highly opinionated and that’s fair enough, they can do their thing and people seem to like what they offer, but boy is it not for me.

Are you on Wayland? Because I don’t think that’s possible yet.

From quick reading, SteamOS 3.0 is only really available for the Steam Deck. As such, I would not recommend it for a desktop user. Earlier versions of SteamOS are no longer supported. Don’t take this as gospel, as I may be mistaken.

Still, I would personally suggest looking in to a more desktop oriented OS for now.

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes

Edsger W. Dijkstra

I think he already sent a letter.